Taking the Temperature of China

The country's "current relative malaise is beginning to look to us like an investment opportunity," writes Tocqueville Asset Management's chairman.

In the 16 years since I started visiting China at least once a year, the pace of change, both economic and social, has been dizzying, and the progress has been faster, smoother, and more durable than had seemed possible. Certainly, China's transformation and enrichment have belied the warnings of impending bubbles or crashes that have regularly issued forth from Western media.

On my most recent trip, in May, I was accompanied by my colleague Allen (Yibo) Huang, who was born and schooled in Shanghai but who received his...